Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at a clash between two schools that share a single building in Manhattan and how it reflects two of the crises facing urban school districts.
Two middle schools have long shared a building on West 105th Street in Manhattan, and as sometimes happens with occupants of shared space, tensions have developed. Enrollment at one of the schools, Public School 145, has climbed in the last couple of years, while the other, West Prep Academy, has lost students.
I asked Troy Closson, whose reporting focuses on K-12 education in New York City, to explain this tale of two schools because it highlights demographic shifts brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic and the migrant crisis.
The first deputy schools chancellor said there are too many schools “that have gotten below critical mass.” One of those is West Prep Academy. How many students, why the decline and what’s the student population like?
West Prep largely serves low-income Black and Latino students. Before the pandemic, it had about 200 students. It’s in District 3, which includes the Upper West Side and parts of Harlem. That area has lost families and students since the pandemic. West Prep’s current enrollment is about 170.
The Education Department wants to move West Prep to another building, and West Prep is also being told it should grow. That has caused a tense conflict between West Prep and P.S. 145 over resources, space and what these populations of students need.
That reflects the larger problem of declining enrollments across the city, doesn’t it?
We’re at a place now after the pandemic where there are not as many families in the city, and a lot of schools have questions about their current size and enrollment. School officials have said they are interested in doubling down on what works, what’s popular, so they can win families back to the system.
But unlike other cities where we’ve seen families leave public schools because of the quality of the schools, here in New York there’s not a lot of evidence that’s what has driven enrollment losses. It’s just families leaving New York, especially Black families.
One of the questions that some educators at West Prep have is if they are required to move to a different building with the aim of increasing their enrollment, and the same number of students just aren’t in the district anymore, what happens then? They’re worried about the future.
Meanwhile, P.S. 145 is bursting at the seams.
P.S. 145 is one of the schools that has had a singularly high number of incoming children over the last two years, from Latin American and Eastern Europe — Ukraine and Russia. The school has dual language programs that made it a good fit for those families, and they helped push up enrollments.
But parents at P.S. 145 have said that because the enrollment grew, the school made painful decisions about repurposing the library and scaling back programs like music and media.
It’s created a complicated debate over what children deserve. Parents have argued over whether programs at P.S. 145, like additional 3-K and pre-K classrooms, are necessities or luxuries when space is so limited.
That added another layer to this debate: What is a necessity?
How did P.S. 145 change as space became tighter?
Parents say it has been tough for them. At a hearing a couple of weeks ago, a lot of parents who maybe had an older kid there a couple of years ago and have a younger kid there now talked about the differences in those experiences and having access to programs that aren’t about math or reading but developing other skills that their kids aren’t getting.
Where does money come in — because it does, doesn’t it?
Funding from the Education Department is allocated to schools based on how many kids are there. School officials have said their concern is that when a school gets too small, it can’t offer all the programs it might want to offer. Can we invest in our sports team, or should we offer an after-school program?
What about the building West Prep is supposed to move to?
The Education Department is trying to move West Prep into a building that is a couple of blocks away, but families and teachers feel it is unsuitable and unsafe. West Prep has a special program for students with autism. They tend to stray more often.
One major sticking point is that the new building has rooms that lead out to fire escapes. The concern is that West Prep’s particular student population might be likely to run down the fire escapes and get hurt.
Also, the new building doesn’t have its own outdoor space. The current building has a unique playground for kids with disabilities, so the West Prep kids would have to essentially take field trips back to the building they’re in now.
Later this spring an education panel will take a vote on whether to move West Prep in time for the opening of school in the fall.
If enrollments continue to shrink, how far is New York from having to close schools?
School officials are trying to avoid having to face that. Closings, we know from research, can be rough on kids.
Any discussion of closings is unpopular to begin with. It’s something nobody in any city wants to talk about, but here especially — because it’s not a school board running the system, it’s the mayor — it’s a particular land mine for City Hall.
Weather
For the first full day of spring — the equinox ushering in the new season occurred at 11:06 last night — prepare for a mostly sunny morning with a chance of showers in the afternoon and temperatures in the upper 50s. At night, it will be mostly clear with a low temperature of 32.
METROPOLITAN diary
Lorimer Street
Dear Diary:
I was living in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in the early 2000s and had never ridden the L train past my stop, Lorimer Street.
One night, though, I was out late with co-workers in Manhattan and had a bit too much to drink. To get home, I got the L at Eighth Avenue, sitting down as the train idled awaiting its departure.
About an hour later I was awakened by the train conductor at the last stop, Canarsie-Rockaway Parkway. He asked what my intended stop was. When I said Lorimer, he asked me to get up and follow him.
I walked with him to the front of the train, where he told me to take a seat across from his booth. He left the door open and for the next hour we talked about life, work and sports while the train made its way back toward Manhattan.
When we got to Lorimer, I got off, fumbled my way home and into my apartment and went straight to sleep.
